Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 02, 2009 @02:46PM
from the castle-aaaaaaaagh dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

Given that these numbers have just come to light, in the incredible coincidence that they also happen to be this week's winning lottery numbers you'll win less money because you'll have to share your winnings with all the other wrong-headed people who think this increases their likelihood. (I am having strenuously to fight my intuition, which is telling me that they are now *less* likely to come up.)

In a strikingly similar incident, the 43rd president, George W Bush, was apparently challenged while in office with an encrypted text by an unknown correspondent. Though the cipher remains unsolved, there are hints that the plaintext, like Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, encapsulates some of the President's profoundest thoughts. Former President Bush hopes that the science of cryptanalysis may one day advance to the point where future generations will be able to read the message. The full text is g

Perhaps, but there's no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a cypher in the traditional sense. A natural language isn't normally "decyphered", since it was never encrypted in the first place.

Given that there are many hundreds of thousands of natural languages today for which there is no written form, it's entirely possible that this is a script invented for such a language. In WW2, natural native American languages were sometimes used in this way as an "unbreakable cypher" - who's to say that medieval Europeans hadn't done the same thing themselves?

If that is the case, then it isn't particularly compelling (we know of many extinct languages for which no known writing exists - and hundreds more go extinct yearly), and is not so much "difficult" as useless - the text could never be read.

The wikipedia article doesn't say anything about using techniques to detect writing that is no longer visible, so I must assume no such techniques have been used.

(It may be possible to establish some of the content of a missing page if the page after had been underneath at the time of writing. Non-destructive techniques for doing this formed a part of the case against the West Midland's serious crime squad in the 90s, where it could be shown pages of confessions had been altered after being signed. However, if no such analysis has taken place, the presence of such data is unknown.)

Regardless, there are many missing pages. From the articles, the page numbers seem to be relatively new compared to the text, so we don't know how many pages are actually missing, we only know how many went missing since being numbered. This makes understanding the text very difficult and even if the text could be translated, there's no guarantee we could even read it or understand it without those pages.

We know vastly more about Linear A than we do about the script on the Voynich manuscript, including the archaeology of the people writing Linear A, yet after all this time we've got no further than knowing the number system and a few of the numbers in it.

Agreed, if someone handed us a (random) book written in Japanese (take your pick which writing style), do you think we could "decipher" it without knowledge of the Japanese language? The half backward sentence structure, the combinations of syllables into letters. Right to left, even bottom to top. Each word being spelled entirely different than our English word. Words having multiple meanings, and when combined with other words having even more unrelated meanings.

Possibly. It depends on the context in which the text is found. But it certainly wouldn't be easy without some clues to the nature of the grammar involved. Hieroglyphics were only figured out because of the Rosetta stone, while most of cuneiform is still incomprehensible.

While your suggestion is the #1 entry, the #2 entry is the one people actually use, and it is listed a a noun.

from m-w.com:Main Entry: 2hieroglyphicFunction:nounDate:15861: hieroglyph2: a system of hieroglyphic writing ; specifically : the picture script of the ancient Egyptian priesthood --often used in plural but singular or plural in construction3: something that resembles a hieroglyph especially in difficulty of decipherment

(Wow, I was going to pick on 'dammit', and at least dictionary.com lists it.)

At the same time, we have to realize that in certain instances it is truly very difficult, or even impossible to read the written text well and find its true meaning, even if we do have the knowledge of the rules of this writing and reading and also use the only good key leading there, which is the Hungarian language in establishing the sound values. After all, we are dealing with the spiritual heritage of a world of 4-5000 years ago; the workings of the minds of the people then was completely different from ours. This difficulty can be bridged only if we become thoroughly familiar with the belief system, statesmanship of the ages BC. It is for this reason that when we do translate a text we must sometimes add lengthy explanations to a given sentence. The following examples will clarify this statement.

The Egyptian and Sumerian texts frequently use the following names of their Sungod: Égúr, Székúr, Kerek Úr, Napúr, Õsúr, Magúr, Útúr, Honúr, Szemúr, Égetõ Úr, Vörös Szemû and some at least twenty more expressions. Western scholars who are not familiar with the key-language understand only the Úr suffix of these words which they translate as God. They also believe that as many such words with Úr endings exist, that many gods were worshipped by the ancients. For them there is a God An, God Utu, God Sek and so on. Anyone familiar with the key-language and the ancients' religion will recognize these words as the names of the same Sungod; the ancients stressed one of the Sungod's characteristics and function by a given name. We may compare this practice to the Roman Catholic Church's practice to call God the Father in his creative capacity, the Son is his redemptive function and the Holy Spirit as his sanctifying function. We will fully understand the Sungod's many names if we are familiar with the concepts of the ancients concerning the Sungod. According to them, the sun, this heavenly body is God's visible picture. Since this picture appears round, they name him Kerek Úr (Round Lord). Since the Sun brightens everything and sees everything, like a giant eye another name of his is Szemúr (Occulate Lord). Since his eye is pairless, they call him Egyszemû (One Eyed), according to the sun's color Vörös Szemû (Red Eyed) and since the Sun resides in the sky they also called him Égi Szem or Égszem (Eye of Heavens). When they contemplated its immense heat they called him Égetõ Úr (Scorching Lord) and Sütõ Úr (Shining Lord). They also believed that he is the only Lord in his world so they called him Honúr (Lord of his Home) and Égi Király (King of Heavens). As they saw the apparent motion as he rises in the morning his name then was Ra-Kel (Ra rises), the rising on the eastern borders Kel-Út (The Road of Rising/East) where he sits down onto his chair: Szék-Úr (Lord of the Chair or the Seated/Settled Lord), later on he sits into his chariot and travels the shiny roads of the skies: Útúr (Lord of the Road) and when he finished his daily journey and reaches the west: Nyug-Út (Resting/Western Road) and as he sinks below the horizon: Esút, Este (The Falling/Evening Road, Evening). As we clarify this section of their belief everything becomes clearer and also realize that the ancients whose religion was connected with the Sun were never polytheistic, they only had one God.

Many words in one of the syllabic alphabet (katakana) have a pronunciation close to english, as they are foreign words phonetically transcribed in Japanese, like ko-n-pu-ta (computer)
Even without that, it is easy to tell apart the complex ideograms and the syllabic characters, if only because of their frequency of appearance. There are some structures easy to spot : polite forms and declarative sentences end frquently by the same words, etc... There are many structures that are easy to spot. I suspect it is the case in any language. The Voynich doesn't appear to obey to any grammar structure. Such a problem ought to be easy : there is a whole book, presumably about plants, and we don't even manage to find a single common word in all these pages that could possibly mean "plant" ? Or "root" ? Or a single sentence structure common to many places ? My bet is on "nonsense written by someone who wished he could write and had an instability making him believe he could"

I quite agree. And Japanese isn't even the worst. There is a writing style where you alternatively write right-to-left then left-to-right. The dead language of Easter Island, Rongo-Rongo, goes one worse and even requires you to turn the page upside-down on alternate lines. (That's the ONLY thing anyone can understand of it.)

The Wikipedia article states that some words are repeated three times, which strongly suggests that words can be modified not only by other words but by groups of other words. Quite a nu

First of all, The Voynich is only 500 years old(give or take), from a time when books were not uncommon, and was very very likely written in Europe, hardly pre-historic. This would be a person in Europe, with contemporary writing, art, and binding supplies, writing in a dead language not otherwise documented anywhere else. Linear A is like FOUR THOUSAND years dead... not really comperable.

That is what makes it so compelling, the fact that it happened, not in a vaccum like the Aboriginal Amazon, not in ancient history like Linear A, not in Stone, or papyrus, or etched on tree bark, but that it happened inside of western society, using "modern methods" (for the day), and it is a language/code that can be verified as not being junk, but that nobody had seen before or since.

Like I said, the UN is showing the number of endangered languages today to number in the hundreds of thousands. One can only imagine what the number was like 500 years ago, when empires routinely extinguished native languages.

Linear A is indeed much, much older but we have the advantage of having many thousands of texts, the context, a better concordance and greater trust in the contents not having been altered.

We know that the page numbers and some of the images are newer than the actual text, so we know t

But it still has lots of patterns that every language known has. Anyone can take a bunch of scribblings down and make it "seem" like a language, but the Voynich manuscript is unique that every part of it seems to be a language, not the work of someone insane.

"A lot" ? All the references I could see were about letters frequency and some words that are repeated sequentially two or three times. If you have any source I would be happy to look into them, but I wonder if the "pattern" is anything more elaborated than a Markov chain on the letters, which the human brain is fairly good at emulating.

That is entirely possible, except that the frequency of character groupings and word groupings seem to match up with real-world natural languages.

Of course, we know from J.R.R. Tolkien's work on Elvish that it's possible to create a "natural language" that fits perfectly with known patterns and yet has no existence in the real world outside of its creation.

This would allow the script to both be nonsense and yet appear coherent to the sort of basic analysis that has been possible. It could even be done by so

Do you have a source about word groupings ? The wikipedia is weak on this one and seems to suggest that only characters frequency (and groups of two or three characters) have interesting characteristics...

if you are interested, Yale (who currently owns the manuscript I believe) has high res images, and more information: Here [yale.edu] Hey, it is a very poorly laid out website, but it is Yale not Wiki, so there is that:P

Perhaps, but there's no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a cypher in the traditional sense. A natural language isn't normally "decyphered", since it was never encrypted in the first place.

Not true. All of the analysis so far suggests that the Voynich is not plaintext (from what I remember the ridiculously low entropy is one of the primary indicators). People like the whole "phonetic alphabet for [insert your favorite obscure Asian language]" idea because it sounds cool, but there is no evidence f

The thing is, we know Linear A was indeed in Minoan Crete and we know a fair bit about Minoan Crete. Although we know a lot about 16th century Europe as a whole, it could be absolutely anywhere in Europe and the amount that is common across the whole of Europe back then was exceedingly small.

Actually, natural native languages were not used as unbreakable cyphers. That's a myth. The code-talkers were trained to do this, and devised a code based on their language. (And actually, the program started in WWI and was so successful they revived it for WWII.) The Japanese figured out that Navajo was being used, and searched out Navajo speakers among POWs to translate. But because the code-talkers actually encoded their message during the translation into Navajo, even these POWs were unable to figure ou

"it's entirely possible that this is a script invented for such a language."

Possible, but highly unlikely.

One of the cool things about the manuscript is not just the script that the text is written in. It's the fact that the diagrams show both plants, and constellations, which are not known on earth.

It could be a religious text (with someone describing what their idea of the next world is like) or it could be an elaborate fiction, like some proto D&D manual. Or it could just be a hoax of some sort. But

Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the boy scout movement, was a spy for the British Army. He encoded maps of enemy encampments as decorations on butterfly wings. Were those maps found 500 years from now with no context, they'd appear to be insects which are not known on Earth.

I'm not saying this is the case here, merely that we can't trust what we assume we know merely because the assumption looks like it might be right. If it didn't look right, it wouldn't be assumed. It doesn't make the assumption reliable.

No shit... I'm taking a (required) summer course on architectural theory and my eyes were permanently crossed by the time we got to Heidegger. What's all this about "the thinging of things?" I'll stick with Vitruvius, thanks.

As for the Voynich Manuscript, the only explanations that make sense to me are that it's a constructed language of some kind, or an elaborate joke played on us by our Renaissance-era European forbears. Though I do like XKCD's "RPG handbook" theory...

The DNA evidence for this claim is inconclusive because it does not eliminate other members of Jefferson's family. In particular, one close relative had a poor reputation, and is a likely candidate for this misbehaviour.

Except that many people came to the conclusion that he was the father before the DNA evidence, based on where he was and how he behaved around the time of the birth, the way he treated that slave family relative to others, and so forth. The DNA evidence was just the icing on the cake.

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."
Why even bother writing a code to tell someone that?

Most likely for the reason that was presented at the end of the article, it was for a bit of fun. It was meant to be an exercise in cryptography, by enciphering something Jefferson knew, he would know when (if) he deciphered it correctly.

Or was that: "In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..." the entire plaintext? (that would make it a more awesome achievement as it's very short).

What's the relevance of the excision of "General" from Jefferson's original.

It wasn't nearly as strong as the author thought, but was still strong enough to resist cryptographers for a long time. That's impressive.

I wonder, though. There's a certain level of indirectness and jitter in the system used, but not enough to raise the complexity even to the single millions, let alone the millions of millions. Would it be possible to increase the strength of the system and still have it memorizable and usable by any person in the field without book, computer or other aid?

Even if the key to this exact code wasn't known, you'd think that all of the types of codes in use at that time would have been known and only a lack of interest kept this one from being cracked much earlier.

The elusive Zodiac Killer's 360 character cipher was never cracked, either, and it's been decades since he mailed it to newspapers. That cipher also seems a bit grid-like, with spacing made deliberately in rows. I wonder if this method would help, at least in part, in cracking it?

If anything, would be nice to see something come up to ascertain his identity, and if alive, put him behind bars.

That's likely. But I think it fits in more with the serial killer MO to actually have a message encoded, just one that other people are "too stupid" to read. A form of power over others, as SKs are apt to be like, that wouldn't be gained by gibberish.

Plus the alignment is too methodical for a somewhat sloppy SK like zodiac.

He wrote the entire draft. The only parts that changed were minute portions and the choice of language he used was replaced by less forceful language for fear of being too alienating to the common man. The WSJ cites him as a contributor. The author needs to read Jefferson's letters. It's right in there. I suppose Stephen King or any other author should be called a contributor to their work after an Editor comes in and helps modify it.

The only parts that changed were minute portions and the choice of language he used was replaced by less forceful language for fear of being too alienating to the common man.

If only it were. Jefferson condemns slavery, in his draft, for one. The omission of a prohibition on slavery from the Country's final documents was one he warned would be paid for in blood. And it was, terribly.

The only parts that changed were minute portions and the choice of language he used was replaced by less forceful language for fear of being too alienating to the common man.

If only it were. Jefferson condemns slavery, in his draft, for one. The omission of a prohibition on slavery from the Country's final documents was one he warned would be paid for in blood. And it was, terribly.

Very true, but I was referring to the rightful and just angst against Christianity that was mellowed. The slavery was not only axed but a deal breaker, so he being a diplomat compromised for the greater benefit of the revolution and made it clear his positions for history to research and restore.

The only reason it's not been solved until now is because no serious cryptanalyst was working on it. As soon as I read the description of how it's done, I knew it would be highly vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. (The guy who cracked it used frequency analysis of letter pairs, because there was no known plaintext available. But if someone were using the cipher on a regular basis, there would be.)

Obscurity IS a level of security, which is good, but it's only one level. Hopefully you have a security system that is robust enough that even when the obscurity is pierced, it is still secure. In the past when people complain about Microsoft depending on security through obscurity, they were referring to the fact that Windows was at one time so insecure that it was only a matter of obscurity that gave it any security at all. That isn't to say obscurity is all bad for security.

In this case, unless you knew the key, it would have been extremely time consuming to discover the solution, even if you knew the algorithm used. Notice it took the guy a week to solve it, even with a computer, and modern cryptanalysis techniques.

And, also, with computer things, there are a lot of things that people commonly assume are obscure, but which, in fact, are not. So be careful what you take to be obscure. It could be that it's a secret to everybody.

Port knocking is a form of password in essence. I can know everything about the method of security, but without the actual sequence it does me no good.

Changing ports on the other hand, requires at the absolute most for me to brute force all ~32k ports, there are port mapping tools that will do it much more simply. Thus obscurity, since once I know what the method is, I can break it easily.

Thus obscurity, since once I know what the method is, I can break it easily.

Well, duh, because he just told you, so it's no longer obscure. The whole idea is that others DON'T know what the method is. Even if you do figure it out though, you still have more levels to get through. Password, etc.

Security through obscurity is not sufficient, but it can be an important part/em of an effective security solution.

Yes, but say a 20 port sequence for port knocking is the equivalent (2^16)^10 = 2^160 keys. That's pretty hard to bruteforce, and any sane portknocking system would block you before you got anywhere close

Which is why I deny port knocking is security through obscurity. Its actually a glorified password, with the advantage of being immune to certain password weaknesses (nobody can make their password 'password' for example) and with different weaknesses instead (a port knock sequence has to be stored somewhere instead of memorized).

> It's just a waste of effort to use crypto, as this story supports.> It's all one big waste of time, effort, and manpower.

Crypto is like a lock (not by coincidence the symbol frequently used to indicate use of crypto IS a lock). A lock is not a once-and-forever solution, but defined in physical security circles correctly as a "time-delay device". With other words, given enough time any lock will be circumvented...broken if you want. Likewise with crypto.